Learning new skills can be exciting. At first you notice that you are improving. You have a picture in your mind of the player you can become. The rewards for your new effort come quickly. Then, after a while you may find that you are not progressing as quickly as you would like to. The early enthusiasm has faded – and so has your motivation. It happens to all of us, in sports, on jobs, with new projects…..

With the loss of enthusiasm comes a wavering commitment. You start to wonder if the effort is worth it. You may even consider - don’t say it - QUITTING! Don’t panic. You have hit what author Seth Godin calls “The Dip”. The Dip is the place between starting something new and mastery. It’s the long wait between beginner’s luck and successfully learning a skill. If you really hope to be an exceptional player you’ll find that there is no other way but through. You didn’t really think it would be easy did you? Nothing worth doing comes easy. If it came that easy every girl you know would be playing in the WNBA and everyone else would be a doctor – and there are a lot of us who shouldn’t be doctors.

If you are asking, “Why do I need to be exceptional?” I’ll ask you, “Who starts out with a goal of being just OK?” Who says, “My goal is to be a mediocre basketball player. Show me how to shoot a below average jump shot.” Nobody does.

The Dip is what separates out the real players from the pretenders. It acts like a screening system that keeps people who don’t care and / or don’t want to do the work out. Most pretenders quit when they hit the Dip. If you want to be good (at anything) you have to work through the Dip.

So how do you get through a Dip? Godin says, “The opposite of quitting is rededication.” That rededication requires you to come up with new strategies. Ideally those new strategies break the problem down into workable (measurable) parts. You won’t get through the dip simply by trying harder. Effort is important but it has to be focused – purposeful. Break down the problem into little pieces and approach each piece with purposeful effort.

It’s important to consider what working with a purpose means. We use the term frequently at practice but I wonder how many of you know what it means or what practicing with purpose looks like (and what it looks like when you don’t practice with purpose). Here’s a few examples.

Shooting a jump shot. Everyone wants to be able to make a jump shot, preferably from about 30 feet out! You walk into the gym grab a ball and start launching. Often you are shooting out of your range – the distance from which you can consistently make a shot using proper form and technique. You are not reinforcing good habits, in fact you are reinforcing bad habits, delaying your progress. Every once in while you get lucky and make one. Using this approach it will take a long, long time to become a consistent shooter. You are not practicing shooting with a purpose, you are just tossing the ball in the general direction of the rim (sometimes). When you practice shooting with purpose you acknowledge that there are things about your shot that need to be improved. It might be lowering the hips to engage the legs for power, It might be focusing your eyes on the center of the rim or focusing on the proper placement and release of the guide hand on the shot. You break down the areas of improvement and focus on one until you have improved enough to move on to the next focus point.

Offhand skills (primarily dribbling, passing and layups). For the majority of you this is your left hand. I don’t know of anybody who has become a good left hand shooter by only shooting with their right hand. We emphasize using your left hand to shoot from the left side of the basket (skilled and experienced players know when it is appropriate to use the strong hand). Yet most inexperienced players will shoot with the right hand. When the instruction is to shoot using the left hand but you shoot with the right hand you are not practicing with purpose. You are just going through the motions. Practicing with purpose would be shooting with the left hand – no matter how bad it looks. Completing your left hand wall dribbles to strengthen the left hand is practicing with a purpose. If you really want to accelerate the process try using your left hand when using a touch pad or mouse. Put your fork in your left hand when you eat (but be careful). The more you use your left hand the stronger and more effective it will become.

Improving balance and foot speed. Undervalued but essential in basketball, balance and footspeed can be improved. Our daily footwork drills are intended to challenge your balance and force the body to adjust, learning, over time, to be more balanced. If you do the drills at half speed you are safe – you probably won’t stumble. But to improve you have to push the envelope – you have to do them at game speed, challenging your body to adjust, risking a stumble or off balance landing. By purposefully pushing yourself past your current, comfortable status you will improve your balance. Apply the same thinking to the speed ladder work. If you are focused on improving your footspeed you won’t be perfect, you will mess up by pushing yourself to go faster than you think you can.

We have all been doing this since birth. As toddlers learning to walk we would stumble and fall. Driven to learn to walk better – because then we can get into more stuff around the house – we learn how to do it better and better, faster and faster. We had purpose. In grade school we practiced our alphabets, over and over again, tracing the dotted lines (do they still do that?) until we could do it on our own.

I suppose it’s possible to learn both ways. With the “Maybe I’ll Get Lucky” method we could eventually learn how to shoot. It might just take a few years. Practicing with purpose accelerates the learning. And we all want to get better as quickly as we can, right?

To practice with a purpose you have to open your mind. You have to consider new and different ways and approaches to improvement. You can’t do this unless you have humility. Being humble in these situations means tuning out your ego. Allowing yourself to accept constructive criticism. It’s really difficult to practice with a purpose and protect your ego at the same time. When you do the purpose, or focus will be on protecting your ego – which will keep you from learning and anchoring the skill. Sometimes players can get in their own heads. They think, “I’m embarrassed, I need to act like I know what I’m doing”. It doesn’t work in basketball. We can, and you can, see what you do and don’t know. To become a player you have to be humble enough to accept the things you don’t yet know. You have to be willing to accept that you have a lot to learn. One of the great things about the game is that, no matter how long you’ve been playing, no matter how old you are, no matter how good you are, there is still a lot to learn. I know I’m reminded of what I can still learn at every practice and every game.

At the end of practice on Wednesday we discussed effort and the need to create competition with the 8^th grade / high school players. Last night I was thinking, for some of you, what we saw was a lack of effort. But after thinking more about it I think there is more to it. I think it is more about status and ego. So many of our players are at the age where self-image is shaky at best. They are under so much pressure to succeed at all that they do that the thought of falling short – at anything – is frightening. What I saw as lack of effort may have been an effort to preserve status and avoid embarrassment – if I act like I don’t care or if I don’t try too hard I won’t look too bad. Some are playing it safe. You can’t get better playing it safe. We have to find a way to be strong, risk failure and learn from our struggles. We have to get through the DIP. When and where we hit the Dip is different for each of us, but we will hit it. There is a Dip on every path to success. You’ll need support to do it. Those who are most successful embrace it, understand it is just part of the deal and start attacking the obstacles, one at a time and with purpose. Know that we understand it’s not easy. We know you won’t always make the right or best play. It’s OK. It’s about the try, the attempt, purposefully attacking the problem. Remember, we have high expectations and we know you can reach them.

I won’t bore you with the real life applications. I’m sure you get it. It’s another example of the long term value of playing basketball.

Bob Peterman